A founder, a self-service line and franchisees who knew him.

Cicis was founded in 1985 in Texas as a self-service, all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. A 2003 profile in the trade publication Pizza Marketplace names Joe Croce as founder and president and gives the founding year as 1985, with the company then headquartered in Coppell, north-west of Dallas. English Wikipedia names Mike Cole as Croce’s co-founder and places the first restaurant in Plano, Texas, adding that the company had begun franchising by 1987. For most of its life the chain traded as CiCi’s Pizza, with a capital C in the middle and an apostrophe before the s.

The early business ran on personal relationships. The 2003 Pizza Marketplace article tells the story of George Brown, a technician for a restaurant-equipment repair company who serviced the ovens in CiCi’s first store. Called out to repair an oven on a busy Friday night — his wedding anniversary, as it happened — he saw queues of customers outside the doors, and in 1991 Croce lent him the money to open a store of his own. Brown was still a Dallas-area CiCi’s operator when the article was written. Another franchisee quoted in the same piece described Croce as the chain’s “charismatic leader”, and the company’s marketing vice-president, Joe Flanigan, summed up its culture as “a hardworking, fast-moving company of an entrepreneurial mentality”.

The format set the terms for the brand. The 2003 profile describes CiCi’s as a self-service buffet in which customers served themselves in the dining room, and Wikipedia notes that the chain gained little from delivery because of that buffet model. When the company later redesigned its identity, its executives spoke about the restaurant interior, the buffet line and the children’s game room alongside the logo, the website and the paper goods.

A management buyout, new chief executives and a 2021 sale.

In 2003 Croce sold the company to the people already running it. Pizza Marketplace reported in September that year that franchisees had learned of the sale at their February meeting in Biloxi, Mississippi, and that the management team would own the company as of 1 July 2003. According to Flanigan, who was one of the incoming owners, Croce had surprised his executives by asking them to consider buying the business six months earlier, during a routine quarterly review. Croce had been approached by quick-service restaurant companies and other investors, Flanigan said, but did not want the chain bought by outsiders who might change the CiCi’s model or fail to honour the friendships he had built with employees and franchisees.

A series of chief executives followed. Wikipedia records that Craig Moore, who had risen from general manager in Dallas, served as president until his retirement in 2009; that Michael Shumsky, previously chief executive of La Madeleine, succeeded him; that Darin Harris took over as chief executive in 2013; and that Bill Mitchell became interim chief executive in January 2018 and was made permanent that March. Harris was the executive who led the 2015 rebrand.

Cicis filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2021 and emerged in March that year under new owners, Restaurant Business reported on 16 March 2021. The buyer was D&G Investors, a group formed by the Applebee’s franchisee SSCP Management and Gala Capital Partners, the owner of Mooyah Burgers, which had acquired the chain’s debt before the filing and converted it to equity in the sale. By then the company was based in Irving, Texas. “The model still works,” Chris Dharod, a principal of SSCP, told the publication. “We like the brand.” D&G Investors has owned Cicis since 2021.

Design and documentation.

A pizza or pasta chain meets its customers in a handful of physical places before anyone opens a menu: the sign above the door, the box or bag that leaves the shop, the counter where an order is placed and the board that lists what can be ordered. Each of those surfaces carries the name and the colours, and each has to work at a different distance, from a fascia read across a car park to a box lid read at a kitchen table.

Some restaurant formats put the kitchen in view, with an assembly line or an oven behind the counter, so the preparation area becomes part of the interior design and the menu board doubles as an ordering guide. Other formats keep the kitchen out of sight and lean on the dining room, the drive-through lane or the delivery packaging instead.

Each guide in this group looks at the brand rather than the food: who started it and where, who has owned it since, and how its name, logo, signage and restaurant interiors are documented in dated, independent sources, with anything the company says about itself marked as its own account.

One dropped apostrophe, one lowercase c and a new tagline.

The defining moment in the chain’s visual identity came on 4 November 2015, when CiCi Enterprises LP unveiled new branding, as Nation’s Restaurant News reported that day. The name became Cicis: the apostrophe was removed, and, as Wikipedia describes it, the second C was set in lowercase and the word “pizza” dropped from the name. The previous tagline was replaced by “Beyond Pizza.” Darin Harris, then chief executive, told the publication that the new, streamlined logo modernised the brand’s look and colours and prepared it for future prototype restaurants. “The logo is one of the next steps in modernizing our facilities,” he said.

The rebrand was planned as a sequence. Sarah McAloon, the chief marketing officer, said the identity would appear first on all digital assets, including a redesigned, mobile-friendly website, and would then be rolled out to signage and paper goods. Harris said its first use in restaurant signage would be at a Cicis in Killeen, Texas, by the end of 2015, with a ground-up new store to follow early in 2016, and that franchised restaurants coming up for renewal would adopt the new look over the following years. McAloon described the thinking behind the tagline: “We’re not just a pizza place.”

Interiors were part of the same project. McAloon said new units would move from a single buffet line to a “scatter-bar” layout of separate stations for pasta, salad and dessert, and that the children’s game room would be treated as part of the overall experience. The company told Nation’s Restaurant News it worked with Sterling Rice Group of Boulder, Colorado, on the new branding and with Back Lot Productions of Atlanta to carry the identity into a prototype restaurant. The name has since proved flexible in marketing: Wikipedia records that in January 2026 the chain temporarily renamed its macaroni-and-cheese pizza “Mac & CaseOh Pizza” for a collaboration with the Twitch streamer CaseOh.

For a design guide, Cicis shows how much a rebrand can say through punctuation and case alone — an apostrophe removed, a capital lowered, a product word dropped — and how a dine-in chain carries its identity from website to sign to buffet layout. Compare it with Fazoli’s, another Italian-American restaurant chain, and Domino’s, a pizza brand whose identity is built around delivery and carry-out. For this guide we use buffet red, cheese gold and dough cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cicis’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.